Western Digital My Passport Studio Portable Drives for Mac

WHOA! Please don't buy these. This drive may be OK but the company is not. This is an improved version of sorts, the original WOULD NOT WORK on any mac I tested incl floormodel macPro.
NOT enough power they said. Then they generously offer to send me a Dandy two into one usb cable (great, takes up two ie both, usb ports) and funnels power from both ports into their crummy drive. Cables never came! 6 mo and have never stored a gb. I am refering to the original passport in black I bought two of at christmas. Two expensive paperweights. I now saw these on the website, and I called and guess what, these run on firewire fine. They may have fixed the usb side I don't know. But they won't help all of us who bought the original passport, except to send us this stupid annoying cable(or not send it) buy any other brand until they fix or upgrade the ones they sold. I don't know that any windows laptops fare better. And check that the usb problem is not still present.
I tried a MBP 2.2

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Nice -- BUT, it uses a proprietary Firewire cable (iLink + USB). Why didn't they use a powered 6-pin Firewire plug like every other hard drive out there?

I think I'll stick with my Firewire 800/400/USB LaCie Rugged Drive.

Awesome! Thanks the post! I just ordered mine (320 gb), says they're available. Way cheaper than Buy.com and free shipping.
Planning to use it to backup my Aperture library on the MacBook Pro when I travel around this summer.

What they don't tell you (except as an asterisked footnote at the bottom of the page) is that if you are connecing via Firewire, you have to also connect the USB cable for "power." Now, why would I want to connect 2 cables to my laptop? As opposed to the Iomega eGo that let's you plug in the firewire cable and have it powered and transfer data only through that one cable. Poor design Western Digital!

Screw WD. I just bought the Passport Elite and returned it. I have the last generation of Powerbook. All the packaging and ANY documentation on the Western Digital site says about system requirements is that you have to be running at least 10.4.8 to use the 320gb drive. I'm running 10.4.11 (one of the few that hasn't upgrade to Leopard yet, I know) and the drive wouldn't mount, just made that awful "dead drive" clicking noise. So I tried it on my brothers MacBookPro (also running 10.4.11), still wouldn't mount, then my moms MacBook (10.5) and it mounted.

So I did some research and apparently early version of the Macbook and Macbook Pro, and obviously the Powerbook and anything previous to those model laptops, don't provide enough power through the USB ports to mount the damn drive unless you're using two USB ports for it, which is really unpractical.

And to top it off, before I found out about this tragic flaw, I attempted to call WD Support and was just put on hold on 3 different occasions from anywhere from 20-45 minutes, with NO reassurance that someone would actually ever pick up the phone, which they never did on any of my calls...

Terrible customer service and a support page that doesn't cover a pretty major flaw in the product... Shame on you Western Digital.

IMO, the OWC Firewire drives at macsales.com are a much better deal.

They offer 250 and 320 GB for $170 and $200 respectively and, have Firewire 800 AND 400 as well as USB 2.0 The drives used are Hitachi Travelstar 5K250, and Western Digital Scorpio 5400RPM 8MB Cache respectively.

The outside dimensions are a little bit larger.

@ gil said...
Intel based Macs can boot from the USB port as well as the Firewire port.


@ maxim Boot with your Leopard DVD. Select the restore from a backup from the utilities menu and connect your time machine backup.

I have a Passport 250 attached to my macbook right now. If you can find one at Best Buy they are heavily discounted. My 250 GB was $99.99 - I've seen them for $74.99.

I don't think there's any difference other than the outside.

Works flawlessly.

this is like dishwashing detergent that continues to be "new & improved"

snake oil.